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African Music Vol 7 No 4(Seb) KOO NIMO, A CONTEMPORARY GHANAIAN MUSICIAN 1 4 7 KOO NIMO: A CONTEMPORARY GHANAIAN MUSICIAN by ANDREW L. KAYE Daniel Kwabena Amponsah, known professionally as Koo Nimo, was bom on October 3, 1934 in Ofoase, a village near Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti Region of modem Ghana. His mother, Akua Forkuo, was a farmer, cloth trader, homemaker, and a chorister at the local Methodist church. His father, Kwame Amponsah, was a farmer, tailor, mason, and musical amateur who played the trumpet in the Ofoase brass band. 1 During his childhood in Ofoase, young Kwabena was exposed to a mix of musical styles characteristic to Akan-speaking villages in the Gold Coast colony during the 1930s.1 2 He played the asratoa, a pair of plum-sized gourd rattles attached to a string, with which Ghanaian children practice intricate rhythmic patterns.3 He made his own drums by fixing rubber over Koo Nimo and the Kumasi Adadam Trio, old tin cans.. He enjoyed the rhythms of c. 1969. L to R: Kwao Sarfo, bottle, Koo adakem, tetia, gome, and konkomma, heard Nimo, guitar, J.K.Barwuah, prempresiwa in the popular music played by the village recreational bands which featured solo and group singing and a variety of drums and idiophones. The subtle tonalities of the Asante-Twi language and the harmonies of indigenous song deeply impressed Kwabena. His maternal grandmother sang indigenous songs in a “modal, moody, bending” style. His mother often sang abibindwom, vernacular Christian poetry set to indigenous melodies, at home and in church. At funerals she 1 A more lengthly treatment of Koo Nimo's life and music is presented in the author's doctoral dissertation (Kaye 1992), and in a book currently in preparation. 2 The Akan, including the Asante, Fante, Brong, Baoule, and others, form one of the predominant populations of modem Ghana and Ivory Coast. Asante-Twi is one of the main dialects of the Akan peoples, and this was the predominant language spoken in Ofoase. “Ashanti” is the British spelling of Asante, and it is still used to designate the province in central Ghana. On the Akan, cf. Fynn 1982. 3 This is still practiced by children in Ghana, but apparently less commonly than in the past (Nketia 1963:4). 148 JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF AFRICAN MUSIC He loved listening to the telling of Ananse-the-spider tales (.Anansesem) by village elders, which were interspersed with story songs (mmoguo) that he would commit to memory.4 sang traditional Akan dirges. More than thirty years of British rule and other influences arising from the region's long history of foreign trade had resulted, especially since the late 19th century, in the introduction of new musical instruments and styles, and the development of new musical genres in the Ghanaian regions. At the age of six, Kwabena was given lessons on the harmonium, and he soon played it to accompany hymn singing at Sunday church services. He was taught English at the local school, and learned English-language school songs. Further exposure to Western instruments came from his older brother Paul, who played the harmonica and Nana Kwabena Tenten, another villager, who performed popular asiko songs to his own accompaniment on the accordion, with rhythm provided by a carpenter’s saw. 5 The Ofoase brass band, in which his father played trumpet, had a repertory of popular highlife tunes and British airs. In 1942, Kwabena’s older sister married a member of the Asante royal family and went to live in Kumasi.6 In that year, Kwabena also moved to Kumasi where, by living in the bosom of Asante royalty, he came to appreciate diverse courtly musical genres. He recalls the “impressive atmosphere and environment of the palace, the paraphernalia of the Asantehene in state”: “All the chiefs canle to take their position, and everyone knew their proper position - the chiefs, the drummers, the musketeers, the horn players, the bearers of the towering umbrellas. It was a great display of organization and discipline.” 7 Kwabena was fascinated with the court linguists and their language (ahenfle kasa), rich in euphemisms and proverbs. He attuned himself to the language of the court drums and ivory horns (ntahera) that rang out appellations to the Asante king (Asantehene). He was also impressed by the inspirational songs of the court minstrels (kwadwomfoo), laden with proverbs, history, and praise for the Asantehene and Queen Mother.8 He later described his upbringing in the Manhyia by saying, “I was irradiated with tradition.” Kwabena was sent to the Kumasi Presbyterian Middle School where the Western- style education included further training in English language and study of Western music. He studied the organ, learned musical notation, and was introduced to the 4 According to Nketia, this entertainment has lost popularity in Ghana as a result of rapid social change (Nketia 1972:172). 5 Kofi Kese (b. 1919), an Ofoase villager who played euphonium in the village brass band in the 1930s, and Paul Amponsah kindly shared their memories with me during my visit to Ofoase in December 1988. On asiko in the Akan regions, cf. Nketia 1972:173-4. * The Amponsah family claims a lineage from the 18“* century Denkyira king, Boa Amponsem. Denkyira, an Akan state to the south of Ashanti, was defeated and incorporated by the latter. 7 Koo Nimo, interview by author, 23 May 1989. 8 On the kwadwom songs, Nketia writes, “...its primary function was to reinforce a ruler's sense of tradition by reminding him of the heroic ideals of the state and the past exploits of his predecessors...” (Nketia 1987:201). KOO NIMO, A CONTEMPORARY GHANAIAN MUSICIAN 149 music of composers such as Bach and Beethoven. At the same time, through access to his brother-in-law’s gramophone player, he delved into a variety of popular musical styles coming out of Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean, including Cuban musicians, the Sexteto Habanero and Don Azpiazu, and recordings by Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington from the USA. In 1948, he was sent to Adisadel College, a prestigious boarding school in Cape Coast, where he spent four years receiving a British-style education Here he sang in the church choir and played Protestant hymns and selections from Bach and Mendelssohn on the organ at Sunday church services. He took piano lessons and practiced music from the repertory of Western classical and popular music. He also played keyboards in the student highlife dance band. He was fond of swing and jazz, and dreamed of becoming a jazz pianist. Soon, however, his musical interests turned to the guitar, which was a popular instrument among the students at Adisadel, and also well-liked in the coastal Fante region around Cape Coast. The guitar was becoming a musical instrument of importance in Ghana, and in sub-Saharan Africa generally in the first half of the 20th century (cf. Kaye 1998). In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, in both rural and urban styles, an increasing number of recordings by Akan musicians were featuring the guitar as the main accompaniment instrument to singing, alongside the percussion. One of the rural idioms was the odonson, which derived from traditions of seperewa (harp-lute) playing. The urban guitar bands of the 1940s and 1950s also played odonson, but they were coming to concentrate increasingly on highlife and related popular styles. Kwabena Amponsah bought his first guitar, a Gallotone from South Africa, on a school vacation in Kumasi. He soon began to study local guitar styles with friends and local guitarists in Cape Coast. During visits to Kumasi, he would spend hours at the gramophone stands at Kejetia lorry park, where he could listen to recordings of guitar-accompanied Akan songs by the Kumasi Trio, Akwasi Manu, Sam, Kwamin, and Ofori Pening. “This was my real academy”, Koo Nimo has said of Kejetia, “I listened to every musician at that time.” 9 One of the first guitar patterns he learned was called “caterpillar walking”, which is actually a form of dagomba, one of the popular coastal West African guitar idioms, known from Sierra Leone to Nigeria. (Ex. I) 10 The dagomba style is performed on a single six-stringed guitar, tuned in the common manner (E-A-d-g-b-e'). Its harmonies are usually based on a seven tone diatonic scale in a Western ‘major’ key such as F, G, E, or C, and emphasize two chords, the tonic major (I), and the dominant seventh (V7). The meter is 4/4, with a relatively fast tempo, in the range of 116 - 136 beats per minute. The melody consists of a 4-beat cyclical pattern that 9 Koo Nimo, interview by the author, 28 December 1988. Kejetia, like any transportation terminal at the present, was a convenient location for selling music. In 1989, music (cassette tape) stands still dotted Kejetia lorry park. “ Collins suggests that the dagomba originated with Liberian sailors (Collins 1985:1-2). In its emphasis on major-key harmonies, and its moderately-fast 4/4 meter, dagomba is very similar to highlife. 1 5 0 JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF AFRICAN MUSIC traces an alternation between the tonic and dominant chords. Ex.l. Caterpillar walking for one guitar. Upper staff: forefinger; lower staff: thumb. Quarter note (crotchet) = 124 Much of the subtlety of this style derives from the rhythmic and melodic variations that emerge from the intricate right-hand thumb and forefinger plucking style. The thumb articulates the lower notes on the beat and on the eighth-note off­ beats, while the forefinger articulates the upper part, often on the sixteenth notes falling in-between the articulations of the lower notes.
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